Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“Be quiet, boy,” snarled Gaunt in Parseltongue, and Morfin fell silent again. 
“And so what if he did, then?” Gaunt said defiantly to Ogden, “I expect you’ve wiped the 
Muggle’s filthy face clean for him, and his memory to boot —”
“That’s hardly the point, is it, Mr. Gaunt?” said Ogden. “This was an unprovoked attack on a 
defenseless —”
“Ar, I had you marked out as a Muggle-lover the moment I saw you,” sneered Gaunt, and he spat 
on the floor again.
“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” said Ogden firmly. “It is clear from your son’s attitude 
that he feels no remorse for his actions.” He glanced down at his scroll of parchment again. 
“Morfin will attend a hearing on the fourteenth of September to answer the charges of using 
magic in front of a Muggle and causing harm and distress to that same Mugg —”
Ogden broke off. The jingling, clopping sounds of horses and loud, laughing voices were drifting 
in through the open window. Apparently the winding lane to the village passed very close to the 
copse where the house stood. Gaunt froze, listening, his eyes wide. Morfin hissed and turned his 
face toward the sounds, his expression hungry. Merope raised her head. Her face, Harry saw, was 
starkly white.
“My God, what an eyesore!” rang out a girl’s voice, as clearly audible through the open window 
as if she had stood in the room beside them. “Couldn’t your father have that hovel cleared away, 
Tom?” 

---

“It’s not ours,” said a young man’s voice. “Everything on the other side of the valley belongs to 
us, but that cottage belongs to an old tramp called Gaunt, and his children. The son’s quite mad, 
you should hear some of the stories they tell in the village —”
The girl laughed. The jingling, clopping noises were growing louder and louder. Morfin made to 
get out of his armchair.
“Keep your seat,” said his father warningly, in Parseltongue.
“Tom,” said the girl’s voice again, now so close they were clearly right beside the house, 
“I might be wrong — but has somebody nailed a snake to that door?”
“Good lord, you’re right!” said the man’s voice. “That’ll be the son, I told you he’s not right in 
the head. Don’t look at it, Cecilia, darling.”
The jingling and clopping sounds were now growing faint again.
“‘Darling,’” whispered Morfin in Parseltongue, looking at his sister. “‘Darling, he called her. 
So he wouldn’t have you anyway.”
Merope was so white Harry felt sure she was going to faint.
“What’s that?” said Gaunt sharply, also in Parseltongue, looking from his son to his daughter. 
“What did you say, Morfin?” 
“She likes looking at that Muggle,” said Morfin, a vicious expression on his face as he stared at 
his sister, who now looked terrified. “Always in the garden when he passes, peering through the 
hedge at him, isn’t she? And last night —”
Merope shook her head jerkily, imploringly, but Morfin went on ruthlessly, “Hanging out of the 
window waiting for him to ride home, wasn’t she?”
“Hanging out of the window to look at a Muggle?” said Gaunt quietly.
All three of the Gaunts seemed to have forgotten Ogden, who was looking both bewildered and 
irritated at this renewed outbreak of incomprehensible hissing and rasping.
“Is it true?” said Gaunt in a deadly voice, advancing a step or two toward the terrified girl. “My 
daughter — pure-blooded descendant of Salazar Slytherin — hankering after a filthy, dirt-veined 
Muggle?”  
Merope shook her head frantically, pressing herself into the wall, apparently unable to speak.
“But I got him, Father!” cackled Morfin. “I got him as he went by and he didn’t look so pretty